Red Wanting Blue gets North Tahoe's Red Room

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CRYSTAL BAY, Nev. - To Scott Terry, singer/guitarist/songwriter of Red Wanting Blue, The Beatles provide the perfect blueprint for how to progress musically as a band.

"From the days of 'Hard Day's Night' and the evolution of their music from record to record, it's like they continued to progress. They continued to move," Terry said. "But it was always just enough that you still swallowed it easy. It was never medicine that had to be taken. It was always what you wanted next. That, to me, is the mark of a successful musical record."

Terry won't call Red Wanting Blue another Beatles, but the idea of not getting ahead of the band's audience may have been more important than ever with the band's current CD, "From The Vanishing Point."

That's because a decade and a half after forming the group and self-releasing seven CDs, for the new album, Red Wanting Blue signed with a label, Fanatic Records. The label involvement invited worries from fans that the group would alter its sound in an effort to reach a wider audience.

While Terry says "From The Vanishing Point" shows some subtle musical growth, he was also determined to stay true to the sound Red Wanting Blue had established up to this point.

"There are very definite similarities between 'These Magnificent Miles' and 'From The Vanishing Point,'" he said, also mentioning the previous Red Wanting Blue CD. "It's not like it's all different now and the band's identity has changed as a result of signing with this label."

While the group has built a loyal, if not large, following - especially in the Midwest - plenty of musicians in Terry's position would have thrown in the towel on the band and a career in music a long time ago.

In fact, the three musicians who joined Terry when the group was formed in fall 1995 in Athens, Ohio, have long since left the fold, as have five other musicians who have been in the group over the years.

The departures are understandable considering the group has generally only seen incremental gains in its popularity with each CD and is far from a household name on the music scene.

Still, the signing to Fanatic Records (with distribution through EMI) did give Terry and his current bandmates - bassist Mark McCullough, guitarist/keyboardist Greg Rahm, guitarist/multi-instrumentalist Eric Hall and drummer Dean Anshutz - enough of a bigger budget to consider hiring a bigger-name producer or step up to a nicer studio. Instead the group stuck with the producer of "These Magnificent Miles," Jamie Candiloro, and chose to equip its warehouse rehearsal space to record "From The Vanishing Point" there.

American rock and roll describes much of the music on "From The Vanishing Point." as the group turns out an unpretentious set of heartland rockers and ballads. The band hits a high point right off the bat with "Stay On The Bright Side," a full-bodied mid-tempo rocker with a striking melody. Nothing else on "From The Vanishing Point" quite equals that opening track, but there are plenty of other worthy tunes, including the mid-tempo anthem "Audition," the melancholy "Love Remains," the country-flecked "Cocaine" and "White Snow," a rocker that is just a bit friskier than most of the other songs on the CD.